Great day sparks hard memories for officer and his family

Costa Mesa police Officer Matt Olin made national news when he resuscitated 4-year-old Nina Villaseñor, who had nearly drowned in her grandfather's pool and had stopped breathing. Today, Nina is fine. MARK RIGHTMIRE, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Olin drives in his patrol cruiser in Costa Mesa. Olin, an El Toro High alumnus, has been on the Costa Mesa police force for 16 years. MARK RIGHTMIRE, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Costa Mesa Police Officer Matt Olin made national news when he resuscitated 4 year-old Nina Villasenor who had nearly drowned in the family pool and had stopped breathing. MARK RIGHTMIRE, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

How You Can Help: According to the Orange County Fire Authority, a swimming pool is 14 times more likely thank a motor vehicle to be involved in the death of a child 4 and under, and 70 percent of children who drown are in the care of one or both parents. Familiarize yourself with water safety precautions: http://www.redcross.org/prepare/disaster/water-safety

It’s hard for Lori Olin to listen to, but for the past week it has been near impossible to avoid. On the local news stations, on “Good Morning America.”

The emergency call recording of her husband, Costa Mesa police Officer Matt Olin, has been everywhere.

You hear him trying to resuscitate 4-year-old Nina Villaseñor after she was pulled out of her grandfather’s pool, unconscious. The girl had been playing in the pool with her water wings and life jacket on, but in the few minutes between when her mom Sara went to the bathroom and came back, Nina slipped off her water gear. Then, without a ripple, Nina slipped to the bottom of the pool.

Come on, baby –

What’s her name? Nina?

On the call recording Matt Olin is speaking with the kind of quickness that’s driven only by desperation.

Come on Nina. Come on Nina –

There is the pat-pat-pat sound of his hand on her back, trying to dislodge the water filling her tiny lungs –

Give me something –

Then, suddenly, miraculously, there’s a cough, followed by a sharp intake of breath. Air, precious air.

There you go –

Relief floods Matt Olin’s voice.

There you go. There you go.

“He did such a good thing. And everyone is giving him all these congratulations, which is great,” Lori says.

“But it gives me chills. There are still all these emotions. I can hear it in the audio. I know how his voice usually sounds, and I can tell how stressed he is.”

Lori has been with her husband since they went to El Toro High. They’ve been together longer than they were apart, so if anybody knows Matt, it’s Lori. She can tell that for all of his 16 years on the Costa Mesa police force, for all of his previous firefighter training and experience as an EMT, Matt was answering this call not as a cop, but as a dad.

And Lori also knows what else was running through his mind.

What if it’s like the other times?

• • •

Off duty, Matt Olin seems exactly like what he is, a good-natured former football player. (A Lake Forest native, he played for Saddleback College.) He’s tall, blond, has wide shoulders and is quick to smile. The Pixar version of him would be Mr. Incredible, the dad from the family of superheroes, “The Incredibles.” (Matt’s brother-in-law jokes that the cartoon is probably based on him, Lori and their two boys.)

He recalls the day the call came in.

It was at the beginning of his shift. He was just clearing a domestic violence call – “a lot of screaming and yelling,” he says, a divorcing couple who need to cool off – when he took the call for Code 3. A baby had been pulled out of a pool, not breathing.

His heart sank. Of all the calls police face, those involving children, he says, are the roughest.

“It’s hard to be a father and see some of the things I see.”

Because he was close by, Matt realized he would be first on the scene.

As he got into the car, sirens blazing, he was thinking one thing:

“Thank God this call is mine.”

“It’s like when I was on the football field,” he replies to a what-are-you-crazy look. “I was always the guy who said, ‘Throw me the ball, I can make this play.’”

And he could make this play. All police officers are trained in basic first aide and CPR, but not all have Matt’s experience as an emergency medical technician. He says he started “going through the checklist in my mind, everything I needed to do.”

He had a mental picture of what likely awaited him. Two other times in his career, he’d had this same call. Child. Pool. Not breathing.

Both those times, the call was too late.

No matter what he did, it wasn’t enough. It could never have been enough.

The children were already drowned.

When he reached the house, he remembers running through the door, heading straight to where the little girl lay; her mother and brother and grandfather and other family members screaming and crying in fear and grief.

It didn’t look good.

“She was gray, gray gray. She wasn’t even blue anymore; around her eyes and her lips.”

He remembers looking at all the family around him, their hands on his back, desperate, pleading. Do something! Do something! “Get the kids out of here!” he ordered, thinking he didn’t want them to see what was likely the life of this girl slipping away.

Then he went to work, administering chest compressions, turning the little girl over.

It was the world’s longest minute and a half.

Then, it happened. She vomited the water and gasped for breath.

“I felt the weight of the world was lifted.”

But he was still worried. What if she had been out too long and there was brain damage or some other complication? He had one thought: “Please let this baby be OK.”

By then, the fire department had arrived, whisking her to the hospital. Matt and other officers jumped back in their patrol cars to serve as an escort for the ambulance. He waited in the ER to see what the doctors said.

The verdict? She was fine.

He smiles as he describes seeing her again. She was smiling, utterly normal, healthy; alive.

“Little monkey,” he says, affectionately.

• • •

Lori knows when Matt has had a tough call.

If he’s working late and comes straight to bed, it was a good night. If, at 3 in the morning, she wakes up and he’s not there, she worries something has happened. If she wakes up and he’s home but the TV is on, she knows he had it tough, that he can’t shut off the shift, that unwinding will be hard.

That day, she knew he’d saved Nina because he’d called her. But because she was working out of town she wasn’t there for what she views as an important job – the “emotional tending” to the human behind the badge. “No one ever asks if he is OK.”

She knows what he was thinking; what could have gone horribly wrong. “He was thinking ... why could he save Nina but couldn’t save the others? It’s that kind of thing that doesn’t shut off. That is the emotional tending. But he’s amazing. He’ll do this and then go volunteer at the kids’ school the next day. I don’t know how he does it.”

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